InQueery 2025
“The Politics of Visibility, Surveillance, and Biopower in Authoritarian Times”
InQueery 2025 Symposium
Thursday, October 23, 2025
Agenda
• 4:00 p.m. Opening Remarks
• 4:15-5:30 p.m. Concurrent Panels
• 5:30-6:00 p.m. Break
• 6:00-7:00 p.m. Keynote: Dr. Toby Beauchamp, “Embracing Trans Regret under Authoritarianism”
This year’s InQueery Symposium invites work that explores how visibility, surveillance, and biopower shape everyday life under authoritarian systems. Drawing inspiration from keynote speaker Toby Beauchamp’s Going Stealth, the symposium asks how surveillance—from airport screenings to online tracking—enforces gender norms, racial profiling, and state control.
Beauchamp’s work challenges us to think about how systems of recognition and misrecognition harm trans communities while also impacting cis, queer, disabled, and racialized people. The symposium calls for critical and creative engagements that examine how surveillance regimes demand both compliance and resistance, and how queer, feminist, disability, and decolonial politics can disrupt these logics.
In a moment marked by global struggles—from immigration enforcement to the genocide in Palestine—this year’s theme asks: Who gets to be seen, who is made invisible, and what does it mean to refuse recognition on empire’s terms?
2025 Keynote
Toby Beauchamp
Toby Beauchamp is Associate Professor of Gender and Women’s Studies at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. He is the author of Going Stealth: Transgender Politics and U.S. Surveillance Practices, which explores how surveillance systems enforce gender norms and expand state control.
This annual event brings in guest speakers to create an intellectual space for intersectional and interdisciplinary conversations that center issues around gender, race, sexuality, and identity.
This event is hosted in partnership with the LGBTQ+ Center and Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies.